Memoirs of a Geisha Re-creating the Feel of Pre-World War II Kyoto on a California Horse Ranch

The evocative movie Memoirs of a Geisha opened in American theaters last December, drawing crowds with its stylish depiction of a geisha’s life in pre-World War II Japan, earning itself a pair of Golden Globe nominations and provoking a mini-controversy about ethnicity in casting. But missing from discussion of the film, in which actresses of Chinese and Malaysian descent were cast as Japanese women, was the acknowledgment that Hollywood has always been perfectly happy to create its own alternatives to the real thing.

Indeed, when people speak of the fabled Hollywood magic, they’re often referring to the kind of exquisite fakery that has been fooling audiences ever since Cecil B. DeMille let the beaches of San Luis Obispo, California, stand in for the deserts of Egypt in his original version of The Ten Commandments. More than 80 years later, moviemakers are still among the world’s most expert illusionists, relentless in their pursuit of perfection. And they’re well aware that in an imperfect world, perfection is manufactured more often than it is found.

John Myhre, production designer for Memoirs of a Geisha, would have loved to film more of the project in the land of its setting, taking full advantage of the storybook scenery that the mere mention of Japan always brings to mind: fog-shrouded hills, commanding temples, delicate bridges that arch over winding rivers strewn with lotus blossoms. But upon arriving, he and his team made an important discovery.

“Everywhere you look, it’s advertisements, asphalt, power lines and satellite dishes on the tops of the houses,” he says. The Columbia Pictures movie, adapted from the best-selling 1997 novel by Arthur Golden, takes place in Kyoto’s hanamachi, or geisha district, and follows the transformation of the waifish Chiyo, sold by her father to an okiya (geisha house), into the beautiful Sayuri, the most desirable geisha in Japan. On another level, the movie is about the cultural and political changes that roiled the country during the 1930s, when most of the story takes place.

“We needed extraordinary control over the filming environment, and we knew we weren’t going to be able to achieve that kind of control if we shot in Japan,” Myhre adds. “What we found was that there’s just not much of 1930s Japan left.”

And so Myhre took lots of pictures (“about 200 a day,” he estimates, over the course of a monthlong visit), made lots of mental notes and then returned to California, where he and his crew of 150 set about re-creating prewar Kyoto in the suburban community of Thousand Oaks, just north of Los Angeles. “I had photographed anything that seemed unusual or unique: the cap of a roof, a shoji screen door, window details. And when it was time to come up with the drawings for our buildings, we drew on those pictures.”

Shooting schedules being what they are, Myhre had only about 14 weeks in which to build his slice of city. In that short amount of time, he and his team erected some 40 Japanese-style structures, most of them three stories tall; dug and filled a 250-foot-long river; and created five separate cobblestone streets, connecting them with alleyways. “It was really like making an old Hollywood film from the ’30s or ’40s, the kind they used to make at MGM,” he says, referring to the era when production designers were expected to fashion the entire land of Oz on a dusty studio backlot.

Though his thousands of photographs proved helpful in designing his Kyoto copy, Myhre needed more than snapshots to aid him in constructing the intimate interior world of Sayuri, the woman caught in a battle for top-geisha status with Hatsumomo, her conniving nemesis. “You can’t beat the book for inspiration,” he says of the novel, which spent two years on The New York Times’ best-seller list and has been translated into 32 languages. “It’s so visual. Reading it, I was transported to another place. Arthur Golden had done such a good job of describing this world; I wanted to represent it visually in a way that would give viewers the same experience I’d had as a reader.”

And so he asked the film’s producers if he might talk to the book’s author, not necessarily expecting that such a conversation would ever really take place. “Arthur Golden called me five minutes later,” Myhre says, still sounding surprised. “And then he sent me 66 pages of notes he’d taken” on the private realm of the geisha. “How they ate, how they moved, everything.”

When it was discovered that the traditional dances performed by geishas lacked the kineticism the filmmakers were after, they did what filmmakers have always done: They took liberties. Director Rob Marshall, who helmed countless Broadway musicals before going on to direct the Oscar-winning movie Chicago in 2002 (for which Myhre won an Academy Award for art direction), wanted to include a dynamic dance sequence that would capture the sensuousness and longing in Sayuri’s soul. The result was Sayuri’s dance, the most pivotal and expressive—if not the most historically authentic—scene in the movie.

“We had all had such a great time working on Chicago, and we were bursting with excitement to do a musical number,” says Myhre. “But a lot of geisha dances were just posing. So we borrowed from modern dance, and even from Kabuki theater. I found some Japanese flowers and took them to Rob; he loved them and said, ‘Let’s use these as the basis for the dance.’”

Some have quibbled over the dance’s contemporary stylization, just as some have quibbled over the casting decisions. But John Myhre isn’t making any excuses. Sayuri’s dance, which culminates in a violent storm of the very flower petals he first took to director Marshall, is visually spectacular. And clearly the casting department knew what it was doing: Ziyi Zhang, who plays Sayuri, was nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe.

“Right from the beginning, Rob said we were making a fable, a fairy tale,” says Myhre. “Nobody wanted to make a museum re-creation. We wanted to tell an emotionally realistic story.”